Steve Miller Slams Music Companies for 17-Year Recording Break

Guitarist Steve Miller in Portland, Oregon, in 2007. Miller has been playing 50 cities a year in a 17-year break between recordings. Source: Tim Brown/Roadrunner Records via Bloomberg

June 23 (Bloomberg) -- Steve Miller urges fans to roll up
the rug, sing along and boogie on his first album in 17 years.

First question for the rocker, who was one of the biggest
stars of the 1970s and 1980s, is what took him so long?

Speaking from his Idaho home, the man variously known as
the Space Cowboy, Maurice and the Gangster of Love, says that
his “Greatest Hits” CDs alone have given him a good income,
which lets him decide how to spend his time. He has sold 30
million records in a career that has given us “The Joker,”
“Fly Like an Eagle” “Abracadabra” and “Rock’n Me.”

Miller, 66, has been busy enough, playing with his band
across 50 U.S. cities every year. He’s making his first European
tour in 25 years in October; found direction through the blues
and R&B on the new CD “Bingo!” and now has his own label.
Miller has no regrets and no love for big music companies.

“The record business has been so unpleasant and so bad for
so long,” Miller says in a telephone interview. “I really
wasn’t interested in allowing those kinds of people back into my
life, with all their demands. For the longest time, I was
uninterested in dealing with EMI Records.

“I live in Ketchum, a little town in the Rocky Mountains.
I don’t even hear radio anymore.” Local people play country,
the Carpenters and the Eagles, he says. When he is touring,
Miller hears chart music, “sounds so artificially made -- it’s
all so synthed up and drum machines, auto tuned -- that puts me
off.” Still, he is optimistic, saying some of the best
songwriting is coming from young acts such as Max Marshall and
the Danger Babes.

Core of Hits

For each concert set list, he has a core of about 14 hit
songs and then adds perhaps nine others. Miller worked with
engineer Andy Johns on his new record.

“I didn’t want to do covers of songs, I wanted to make
them my own,” Miller says. The choices “were all hit singles
in Texas in the 1950s -- three-part harmony, lots of dual guitar
parts. It was all recorded analogue... it felt like it did when
we first started making records.”

The material fits into the band’s sets and avoids a
problem: “Audiences are so conservative, if you want to play
something new, 5,000 people go get a beer and they don’t come
back until they hear the opening riffs of ‘Fly Like an Eagle,”
Miller says.

One of his favorite new recordings is “All Your Love (I
Miss Loving).”

Otis’s Guitar

“That’s an Otis Rush song,” he says. “When I was in
Chicago, Otis was the first blues guy who really liked me. I was
22 years old, and when I walked into a club and Otis was
playing, he’d wave me up to the stage and hand me his guitar and
then he’d continue singing and I’d play.”

The track was the signoff to Miller’s last album, “Wide
River” in 1993. Now, on “Bingo!,” it has more of the Miller
hallmark: “I’ve recorded it twice and probably will do it
again,” he says.

Miller was taught his first chords by Les Paul and started
to play professionally at 12. He dropped out of college to work
alongside Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Paul Butterfield and Buddy
Guy in Chicago. “Bingo!” is also, in songs such as Jimmy
Reed’s “You Got Me Dizzy,” a testament to Miller’s keep-it-simple vibe: “I like hooks and choruses, things people can sing
to.”

The CD highlights a new band member, singer Sonny Charles
from the Checkmates, who Miller says has fitted right in on
tour, tackling “The Joker” and other personal songs.

Harmonica Tribute

It also features the last recordings of harmonica player
Norton Buffalo, who was Miller’s “partner in harmony” for 33
years.

Last August, Buffalo felt unwell at the end of a tour.
“Norton thought he had pneumonia,” Miller says. “He went to
the hospital and they told him he had lung cancer and brain
cancer, and he died 60 days later. Norton was the last guy you
thought would ever die that way: He didn’t smoke or drink and
was a vegetarian.”

The record is dedicated to Buffalo. “He went out with his
boots on and his spurs janglin’,” says Miller.